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This is Dave Young's Forum. Can you really bridge the gap between reality and training? Between traditional karate and real world encounters? Absolutely, we will address in this forum why this transition is necessary and critical for survival, and provide suggestions on how to do this correctly. So come in and feel welcomed, but leave your egos at the door!

In 1995 I had a chance to visit Moscow and St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) after the fall of the Berlin wall. I got to visit Lenin's tomb, the Kremlin, various churches being "de-whitewashed", etc. What I remember is a mix of people. On the one side you had the Marxist-Leninists with dour looks on their faces, upset that their world was being turned on its ear. On the other side you found real people with real lives, real dreams, real trivial pursuits, and ordinary problems and issues.

What I find so gratifying when I travel is the discovery not of what makes us different, but the humanity that we all share.

I think it is better to have no country than a country with a bad leader.
How can there be happiness in a badly governed country?
There can be no tranquility, no matter how forced or controlled for "show" in a country, with such rulers.
As such, there can be no life in a bad place.

Meta, Somalia does not have centrally run government. It's run by fiefdoms and warloads. Life there is not a bowl of cherries, either. But I get what you are saying.

When I was in Moscow and St. Petersburg as a tourist in 1997, Bill, the guide we hired to tour us around Moscow brought us to cemetary where, among others, Stalin's wife was buried. Our guide told us about how Lenin had dressed his wife down something fierce during a dinner party, after which she retreated to her bedroom and committed suicide.

Overhearing this conversation was an older Russian gentleman, who then proceded to tell our guide that it was poor form to talk about Stalin like that, and that no one really knows what happened and that only God should judge Stalin. Marxist-Leninist indeed.